WordPress gave us 25 pages and then took them away — one sed command at a time.

This site ran on WordPress for exactly one week. In that week: a template edit broke every page at once, a content push hit the wrong page IDs, the cache lied about what was deployed, and every single change required SSH + WP-CLI + cache flush + prayer.

The breaking point

The final straw was a nav update. One link. To add it we had to:

  1. SSH into the droplet
  2. sed a PHP template file
  3. Hope no quote characters broke
  4. Flush the cache
  5. Verify by curl
  6. Repeat when it broke anyway

That’s not a workflow. That’s archaeology.

The stack now

GitHub repo (Zeus-Delacruz/zeus-site)
  → git push to main
  → Cloudflare Pages auto-builds (npm run build)
  → static HTML on a global CDN
  → live in ~30 seconds

No database. No PHP. No cache flush. No SSH. The site you’re reading this on is a set of static files served from 300+ edge locations, for free.

What we lost

Nothing. Forms still work (Zoho embeds are just <script> tags). The blog is markdown files — easier than the WP editor. The design system is one CSS file.

What we gained

  • Deploys in 30 seconds, not 5 minutes of tool wrestling
  • Every change is a git commit — full history, full rollback
  • Zero breaking changes possible — static files can’t fight each other
  • Free hosting — the $6/mo droplet is now powered off
  • Instant cache purge — every deploy is a fresh cache, automatically

The WordPress droplet still exists, powered off, as a snapshot of the old world. It won’t be missed.